[jwise0]

Hi, HN! Author, here. Yeah, I was a little disappointed by the GPL and attribution issues, too. But also, I feel a little bad not having given them too much time to respond, or too much heads up that I was gonna write a piece about it. So if anyone has a way to reach out to them, I don't want to trash them too much, and I'd be really happy to update that blog post!

But also, the other side of this is that the attribution issue is, perhaps, only 50% of my thrust here -- the other 50% being that it's actually a really cool device inside, and it's neat to see how they managed to build a device that's (mostly) competitive with Garmin's rich feature set so quickly. And so that, I think, might be what would be even more interesting to HN, rather than just torching them. If they opened the platform up to tinkerers a little bit -- perhaps if they 1) unlocked the bootloader; 2) provided /system images; and 3) enabled a switch to give you access to adb -- then it would be a really really cool form factor of a toy for a lot of different uses.

[chippyhawkeye]

Hi, I just sent you an email, I searched my inbox and spam and didn't see anything from you. Not sure what happened there. We're working on getting the GPL and attribution issues all sorted, that was ignorance on my part versus anything willful. Sorry about your photos and such, if it makes you feel any better I did it to myself at one point as well...

-Chip from Wahoo

[kingosticks]

Chip, while it's great to hear you are working on this, I'm struggling with the idea of someone being ignorant to this. Or do you just not know where your software comes from?

[rhencke]

It's honestly very common people are unaware.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/11/08/gpl-enforcement.html

> I'd say that 98% of the violations I've ever worked on since 1998 have been unintentional and due primarily to negligence, not malice.

(author of the above statement led FSF's GPL enforcement for many years)

[kingosticks]

Fair enough. At least this one is being fixed!

[jwise0]

Oh, and a quick update on this -- I just got mail back from Chip at Wahoo. (Looks like my previous mail got caught in a spam filter.) They're looking to get a bunch of the attribution and source issues cleaned up shortly. I'll update the blog post later today, but I wanted to give HN first knowledge of this!

[Plaastix]

Awesome teardown! I would never have guessed that the Bolt was an Android device. You should have run the Bolt APK in the Android emulator on your computer instead of on your actual phone. Nevertheless, great read.

[Nexxxeh]

I enjoyed reading, your writing style is fun and engaging. JSYK though, you typo'd "nothign" in the second paragraph of "How does it work?"